It is easy to find recipes that are delicious, but often they aren’t as healthy as you would like.
You’ve probably heard people say that eating right is the most important thing you can do to improve your health, but it’s really hard to stick to. There are a million reasons why you might be having trouble doing that, but there’s no reason you have to give up. In fact, you can make it easier for yourself by finding out exactly how you can turn any recipe into a healthy one.
Today we’re going to talk about how to make recipes fit your diet.
Decide on the Recipe
A good way to decide which recipe to modify is to pick one that’s simple and easy. Take a look at how many ingredients there are in the recipe and the number of steps in the recipe. If you can find recipes with few ingredients and simple steps (or ingredients and steps that can be simplified), it’ll make the process much easier.
If you think that the ingredient list in a recipe is too long or complicated, then you can find ways to condense it into smaller, simpler parts. If you want to simplify it further, you can combine two or more recipes that are similar. Then, try to simplify each part of the combined recipes. After you’ve made all of these modifications, it should be easy for you to find a recipe with fewer ingredients and fewer steps.
For example, a recipe may call for a long list of spices including basil, oregano, rosemary, thyme, and marjoram. These are all in Italian seasoning, so to simplify the recipe just add up the total amount (how many teaspoons or tablespoons) of all those seasonings and use that much of Italian seasoning.
This can be done with recipes that have sauces too. Is it a marinara sauce that the recipe is having you make with a bunch of complicated steps? An Alfredo sauce? You can either buy a jar of that sauce or find another recipe that has a lot less ingredients and/or steps.
Pick the Right Ingredients
Look for recipes which have ingredients that you already have on hand or are aligned with your diet. This will make modifying the recipe to fit your needs easier. If you only need to swap out a few ingredients then the recipe will be easier to rewrite and find alternatives for.
For example, if you find a recipe that looks delicious but includes a lot of exotic ingredients that aren’t found at your local grocery store, and the recipe is for over easy eggs but you don’t eat eggs and there’s no vegan substitute for over easy eggs, then that’s probably not going to be an easy recipe to try and convert to fit your diet. Keep looking.
Write the Recipe
The next thing to do is to write down or print out the recipe that you found. Write out the changes you need to make to the recipe initially in order to make it fit your diet. For example, replacing meat with meat alternatives, swapping flour based pasta for bean pastas etc.
As you’re cooking it’s important to take notes of all the changes you end up making (because you will make changes). You should note the seasonings, herbs and spices, any other ingredients that you add, and things that did or didn’t work. This way, you can adjust the recipe for next time.
Watch this video to see in real time how I modify a recipe to fit my Bright Line Eating lifestyle.
I have been tweaking recipes for years now. I use the “make it fit” technique, which means I adjust the recipe to fit my personal preferences and dietary needs. When you have a diet that is different from what most other people eat it’s good to know how to make recipes fit your needs. With this recipe tweaking guide, I hope you will now be able to make delicious recipes fit your specific needs.
